Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living The Farm Crisis?

I985, and such? How were you effected?

I was in my early 20s then, and doing books on my rented land, using my Dad's machinery but covering my own fuel, seed, spray, fertilizer, insurance and combine expenses was so depressing I went another career direction. Still helped Dad till he passed away in 1990, and Mom rented the home place out. We were a small operation, just not big enough for two generations to live on.

My FIL did well. He never got over extended and was able to buy several farms at the bank auctions.

260, bad economic times tend to weed out small operations. First the less efficient ones, but even a well run small operation just doesn't have enough margin in bad times to keep the business afloat, and live too. My Dad figured 1.5 calves a month for health insurance for him and Mom before they hit Medicare age...on a 60 cow operation, thats a hit. And as small operators get in trouble, larger and well run operations gain opertunities to pick the small operations up.

Today, I don't think I can think of a smaller, local farm ranch that isn't afloat without a couple of outside jobs.

My FIL didn't like to see anyone fail, but there were some guys who lost their farms because they didn't put enough money away when times were good. I know that he used to talk about a good friend of his who lost the family farm in part because he bought expensive calves so that his kids could win champion ribbons at the county and state fairs. When you've got several kids showing, that ran into real money over the course of a decade. He bought a few farms to keep them locally owned, so that absentee owners, mostly doctors and lawyers from Omaha and Lincoln, couldn't buy them. He also left farmsteads standing so that the families who had owned those farms wouldn't lose their homes, while the absentee owners often tore down the farmstead so that the land could be planted hedgerow to hedgerow.

Sounds like a good man. It is the way of the world that farms get larger, they're more efficient. Machinery gets cheaper per acre or per cow when you have more acres and cows. The fellow who leases our farm has what was 3 small operations 40 years ago. He still works in town as does his wife. He puts in a lot of long days, and his father and kids do a lot too. But back to Wabigoon s question, a lot of young people who came of age in the 1980s didn't go into farming in our area, eastern MT, due to the economics and several dry years. And a lot of operations got in trouble due to inefficiencies of management, size, or both. We kept our place together, but it wasn't big enough to retire my Mom and support me both. She did all right with renting it out to a larger operation, and I had a good career, living better than if I'd tried to make the farm a go.

go dumb A$$ go you got it all to yourself!!!!!

My dad saw several farmers that paid way to much for land, go bankrupt in that time frame. Quite a bit of land was repossessed and sold at a normal price. The math doesn’t lie, but some farmers think they’re smarter than the math.

Effect is a noun

Affect is a verb

aint no crisis as long as those gov. welfare checks keep coming in the mail!!!!!

The banks allowed a lot of this to happen as well. Heard stories of some brothers who would see a farm sell near them for an inflated price go to the bank and demand that theirs be worth that much so they had more borrowing power then they started bidding up land , then go back to the bank get more. It was a vicious cycle for a few years.